Platinum stayed within a tight $10 range all day long, but ended at the top of it, at $1121/oz., up $4. Overnight, platinum is sharply higher.

Silver tumbled as low as $13.00 as the Comex opened, but shot sharply higher by mid-morning, then held onto its gains for the rest of a sideways day, closing at $13.51/oz., up 7 cents. Overnight, silver has edged higher. (Click here for charts)

It wasn’t a very spirited day for the precious metals, but they managed to come back from early selling to all post small gains.

The usual suspects provided no sense of direction, with the price of oil slipping, the dollar edging back a bit, and equities unable to make up their minds, with a sharp late rally following a slide for most of the day.

Analysts said the price of gold rose after the dollar weakened due to remarks by Treasury Secretary Geithner with regard to a proposal by China that would replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Geithner initially said he was “quite open” to China’s suggestion of moving toward a currency system linked to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a basket of dollars, euros, sterling and yen, as a super-sovereign reserve currency.

That spooked investors who envisioned massive selloffs of countries’ dollar reserves, and raised gold’s profile as the ultimate hedge against any such development.

But the rally was effectively capped as Geithner later clarified his terms, and some better-than-expected economic data were rolled out.

“Increased risk appetite following the tackling of toxic assets and surprisingly strong economic data weighed further on precious metal sentiment,” wrote James Moore, of TheBullionDesk.com.

Moore predicted that gold could remain around $900 to $965 for the time being, “with scrap sale curbing rallies while invest demand provides support.”

Source: Precious Metals Post Modest Gains

This from Rude Awakening:

Now that the Obama Administration is about to descend upon Washington DC, the nation’s list of “Top Priorities” will receive a makeover. I will leave it to political pundits to evaluate the pros and cons of the makeover. My beat is investing. So I will be looking for opportunity in those industries that seem most likely to prosper during the early days of the Obama Administration. Clean Energy and Infrastructure are two leading candidates…which is why Trinity Industries (NYSE:TRN) is one very promising stock.

Trinity is a multi-industry company. It has divisions that sell products and services to the construction, transportation, industrial and energy sectors of the economy. Trinity’s five principal business units include its Railcar, Railcar Leasing and Management Services, Inland Barge, Construction Products and Energy Equipment groups.

I’ll get to the windmill angle shortly. But first, I want to explain that each of Trinity’s business units has its own story. And this helps put the windmill tower business in perspective.

Trinity’s Railcar group has a long history of building and repairing railway cars and components. These include auto carrier cars, boxcars, gondolas, hopper cars, intermodal cars, specialty cars and tank cars. So Trinity has long experience in fabricating metal for tough outdoor jobs like railway equipment.

And Trinity’s Construction Products group has a long history producing concrete, aggregates and asphalt, as well as highway products like the beams and girders used in highway bridge construction. Thus, the Construction group has solid experience serving customers in the construction and foundation industry.

But the business group that we want to focus on is the Energy Equipment Group (EEG). The EEG manufactures large tank systems (such as propane tanks), tank containers, tank heads for pressure vessels and structural wind towers.

So the EEG capitalizes on Trinity’s long experience in building robust metal systems like rail cars and pressure tanks. And the EEG utilizes the corporate experience in the foundation and construction work that the Construction group has.

Trinity’s Energy Equipment Group produces wind towers through a wholly owned subsidiary called Trinity Structural Towers Inc. Quite simply, TSTI fabricates tubular towers, and I mean BIG tubular towers.

These tubular towers are the large poles on which the windmill turbines sit. They can be 20 or more feet in diameter at the base, and 250 or more feet high. Some of the poles even have an elevator inside, so the maintenance people can get to the top. And some of the towers are so big that you could land a helicopter on the topside platform. Is that big enough for you?

These massive towers have to be able to withstand the utmost in stress. First, there’s the windmill turbine and blades that can weigh up to 100 tons – the weight of a fully-fueled Boeing 757. And then this assembly has to handle the stress of high winds, heavy rainstorms and lightning strikes. The towers will spend the next 40 or 60 or 80 years exposed to the elements. The turbine blades at the top can be over 200 feet long and rotate at speeds of over 20 revolutions per minute. That’s a full revolution of the blade set every three seconds. And that’s one heck of a lot of stress. So only the strongest tower systems can hold up.

Just the tower foundations alone can go 50 or more feet into the Earth. And because soil and bedrock conditions change over any large area, almost every windmill tower requires its own unique engineering, excavation and construction plan.

So TSTI offers an array of services related to design, fabrication, construction, installation, testing, operation and maintenance of windmill towers and generating systems. In this respect, TSTI provides steel turbine components, concrete and aggregates, product transportation and specialized coatings that relate to wind tower design and construction. (Just the effort to transport these large tower components to the site is a logistical business in and of itself.)

TSTI operates some massive production facilities. Indeed, the TSTI plants are among the largest production facilities in North America for fabricating tubular wind towers. TSTI can fabricate to the detailed design of a turbine manufacturer like GE (NYSE:GE), Vestas or Gamesa. Or TSTI can work with customers to design and fabricate towers that meet unique criteria for both the turbine and project location.

TSTI subjects its towers to strict quality tests similar to those used for building high-pressure tanks and railway tank cars. And Trinity adds value with its extensive corporate experience (from railway cars and barges) in coating structures exposed to every conceivable weather condition. This is critical for the future maintenance and safety of the tower. After all, the tower holds up the turbine and generator. And a steady generator is the key to the overall reliability of the power system — not just of the windmill itself, but for feeding power into the overall electric grid.

Trinity is currently producing towers to support turbines as large as 2.5 megawatts, enough electricity to power about 1,750 homes ( or two average-sized Wal Mart -NYSE:WMT-stores). The next generation of turbines will be rated at 3 megawatts or more, and Trinity will have towers for those, as well.

Wind power currently produces a fraction of 1% of the U.S. total electrical supply. But there are plans and policies afoot to increase U.S. electric power output to more than 20% of the total supply within the next 20 years. The only way to do this is by setting big turbines onto big tubular towers. No, make that lots of big turbines onto lots of big tubular towers.

And who makes those big tubular towers? Now you know.

Demand for rail cars and barges has fallen in the past year, and this has hurt Trinity’s overall profitability. But Trinity is compensating with a fast-growing backlog of orders for windmill towers. Trinity even pays a dividend of 32 cents per share, or a yield of about 0.9%.

I expect Trinity to be a growing stock, even in a market that will be weighed down by many other negative economic and political issues going forward. By the end of 2009, Trinity could be selling for $46 per share.

Source: Buy Trinity Industries

But US investors shrugged off the employment news. The rally continued…it has gone on for a month. The Dow rose again yesterday; this time it was up 298 points to 8,934. If the rally retraces 50% of the losses, it will make it all the way to 11,000. So, this trend probably has a way to go.

Oil rose too – back up to $43. And gold shot up $17 to $769.

Commodities, stocks, precious metals – almost everything was up yesterday.

One important exception: treasury bonds. The yield on ten-year T-notes rose to 2.76%…leading Bloomberg to report:

“Treasuries fall as US to sell more securities than expected.”

Watch those Treasury yields. Along with the dollar they are going to tell the tale of the NEXT big bubble – the LAST big bubble of the whole Bubble Epoque – a bubble in public debt.

All over the world, the feds are desperately trying to inflate their currencies. People want money. People need money. And they need to spend money.

From the US this morning comes news that a record one in ten homeowners is either in arrears on his mortgage or already in foreclosure. And everyday brings more dudes without paychecks. With no savings…and no jobs…people are squeezed hard. They can’t spend; they can’t even keep up with their mortgage payments.

So, the simpleton feds are giving people more cash and credit.

As everyone knows, what got them in trouble in the boom years was spending and borrowing. So what do the feds do? They borrow and spend more! Altogether, they’re putting up more than $10 trillion to try to reflate the world economy.

Where do they get that kind of money? First, they borrow it. Then, they print it. So far, borrowing has been easy. Because, while asset prices are falling, investors lend to government in order to protect their money. And with consumers not spending, prices fall – so there is no consumer price inflation to worry about.

In fact, food and energy – key components of consumer prices, though not of the core CPI – are actually falling. And when prices fall, consumers have an incentive NOT to spend, because they will be able to get what they want at lower prices in the future. That’s when a recession gets to be serious; it’s what happened in Japan. And there’s not much the feds can do about it, because they can’t push their lending rates below zero. So, the feds are sweating deflation – not inflation. They want to avoid it in the worst possible way.

What’s the worst possible way to avoid deflation? Print money. ‘Governments can always avoid deflation,’ says Ben Bernanke — but only if they’re reckless enough to risk runaway inflation. ‘And you can really make a mess of things,’ Gideon Gono might add, if he had any idea of what he was doing to Zimbabwe.

And it can happen suddenly. There are huge piles of cash – in T-bills, in money-market funds, in foreign central vaults waiting out the crisis. At present, the owners of this cash are more worried about deflation than inflation. But at some point – maybe in 2009…probably in 2010 – that will change. Borrowing and lending money will prove ineffective. Real inflation – otherwise known as the kind of money that comes from trees – will be the only option left. Eventually, the feds will get the hang of it…inflation will soar…investors will dump dollars and T-bonds…and the last bubble, in government debt, will blow up.

*** Our world tour continues. We’ve left the smells of Mumbai – spice, sweat and smoke – for the clean comforts of Melbourne, Australia.

But everywhere we go, there we are. We carry our doom and gloom with us, along with our toothbrush.

“Australia is no different,” says a colleague. “People lent money too freely and spent it too readily. House prices soared. Debt went a little crazy. But Australia is more like South Africa than like India. It’s a resource economy…so we went bust later…when the commodity bubble blew up. And when we went bust, we went bust hard. These commodity producers are down even more than the Nasdaq or the Dow. And now unemployment is rising. It was as high as 15% in the early ‘90s, the last time there was a slump in Oz.”

But don’t worry, dear reader. The feds “Down Under” are taking action. They’ve promised to send out a check – to qualifying parents – for $1,000 per child. Senior citizens will get $1,400.

Why the giveaways? Don’t be so thick, dear reader; it’s the worldwide financial crisis. The feds can get away with anything.

Sending out checks is a simple way of “reliquifying” the economy. Especially if you send the checks to poor people. They spend the money.

“TVs and hookers,” says Dan Denning. “They’re both bound to go up…”

Sending money to people probably works better than bailing out Wall Street. If what you’re trying to do is to encourage people to spend, the best thing to do is to put as much money in as many hands as possible. If the government wanted, it could send everyone a $10,000 check…or even a $100,000 check. Of course, the bigger the check, the more obvious the scam.

Nobody bothers to think about it – especially not in a crisis – but if they spared a minute to reflect on it, they would notice that it is nothing more than fraud and grand larceny. In order to put money in some people’s hands, they have to take it out of other people’s pockets. Or, just print it up. Either way, resources are stolen and redistributed. The rightful owners of the money get less of what they wanted. The beneficiaries – whether they are Wall Street’s insiders…or single mothers in the Outback – get more.

*** Sign of the time: a headline on the web this morning: “How to look gorgeous – on the cheap!”

Source: Hey Dude, Where’s My Job?